For once, Richard Dawkins is lost for words

Atheists’ arrogance is their Achilles’ heel, as a cringemaking radio
performance has proved.

Which of us hasn’t groaned when the Rev Giles Fraser, former canon of St Paul’s, pops up with his Thought for the Day on Radio 4? Dr Fraser is the archetypal 21st-century vicar, as predictably Lefty as he is drearily on-trend. That “former” prefix is because, you’ll recall, he resigned after welcoming the Occupy protesters to his cathedral. And since leaving St Paul’s he has, in a form of caricature made flesh, become a Guardian leader writer. But I take it all back. Giles Fraser, you are now my hero.

In a discussion on the Today programme yesterday, Dr Fraser skewered the atheist campaigner Richard Dawkins so fabulously, so stylishly, and so thoroughly that anti-religion’s high priest was reduced to incoherent mumbling and spluttering.

The two men were debating some new figures produced by Prof Dawkins’s think tank, the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science. (A typical Dawkins touch: not just any old Foundation for Reason and Science but the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science.) The statistics purport to show that most people who identify themselves as Christian turn out, when questioned on what they actually think, to be “overwhelmingly secular in their attitudes on issues ranging from gay rights to religion in public life”. Dawkins’s conclusion is that these self-identified Christians are “not really Christian at all”.

If you were trying to come up with a definition of misplaced intellectual arrogance, you could not do better than having the planet’s most famous atheist issuing diktats on who does and doesn’t count as a proper Christian. Prof Dawkins then announced, triumphantly, that an “astonishing number [of Christians] couldn’t identify the first book in the New Testament”.

The transcript of the next minute or so only hints at how cringingly, embarrassingly bad it was for Dawkins.

Fraser: Richard, if I said to you what is the full title of The Origin Of Species, I’m sure you could tell me that.

Dawkins: Yes I could.

Fraser: Go on then.

Dawkins: On the Origin of Species…Uh…With, oh, God, On the Origin of Species. There is a sub-title with respect to the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life.

It was a golden minute of radio. But as well as being hilarious, it was hugely symbolic. In The Daily Telegraph yesterday, Baroness Warsi highlighted the militant secularism on the march in Britain. But as Dr Fraser revealed, the atheist army is led by an embarrassingly feeble general. The arrogance and intolerance of the atheists, exemplified by Prof Dawkins, is their Achilles’ heel.

Last week’s court decision to ban prayers at the start of council meetings is all of a piece. The judge may or may not have got the law right – there will almost certainly be an appeal. But it is the National Secular Society which, in taking its case to court to have its views imposed on the rest of us, is responsible for the ban on Christians praying.

As a Jewish schoolboy, I had to sit through Christian prayers at the end of every assembly. It would not have occurred to me or any other Jew I knew that we should try to stop them praying in front of us. We were a small minority at a school with a large majority of Christians. I simply sat silently, my mind wandering off to other things.

The militant secularists, however, have only one modus operandi – attack. Respect for others’ views seems to be entirely missing from their moral calculus.

They entirely miss the irony of their position. Religious leaders who focus solely on a sectarian appeal to their own followers, and who seek to raise their own standing by diminishing the views of others, end up on the margins of serious debate. And as their noise drowns out the quieter, less confrontational majority, they act against their own religion’s interest.

We all hear about Muslim leaders issuing fatwas against homosexuals, preaching hate and the extermination of the Jews. But who hears of an Imam who is a credit to their religion?

And yet the extremists are merely a flipside of the atheists. Their actions, too, are entirely negative, aimed at winning plaudits from fellow atheists and in the process poisoning the rest of society against them. We wait in vain for a high-profile atheist to acknowledge that we can all learn from some religious leaders, even if we do not share their faith. The past two Chief Rabbis have shown the benefits of a more open approach, reaching beyond one’s own followers. Lord Jakobovits and Lord Sacks have been feted far outside the Jewish community. Neither were ennobled because they were Chief Rabbi; none of their predecessors had been so honoured. Their elevation to the Upper House was because many gentiles regarded them as figures who had something exceptional to contribute to public life. Where is that contribution from atheists? We’ve had nothing but negativity from Richard Dawkins. And he is now, after yesterday’s intellectual savaging, a busted flush.